the houses
of all who had pretensions to literary taste. The reputation of the book
spread to England, and Major Whyte Melville did not disdain
to place the lines of the dashing Australian author at the head
of his own dashing descriptions of sporting scenery. Unhappily,
the melancholy which Gordon's friends had with pain observed
increased daily, and in the full flood of his success, with congratulations
pouring upon him from every side, he was found dead in the heather
near his home with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain.

I do not propose to criticise the volumes which these few lines of preface
introduce to the reader. The influence of Browning and of Swinburne
upon the writer's taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however,
a keen sense for natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living.
If in "Ashtaroth" and "Bellona" we recognise the swing of a familiar metre,
in such poems as "The Sick Stockrider" we perceive the genuine
poetic instinct united to a very clear percept